LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the production of locality in the oral palestinian poetry duelThis heroic time evoked in the performance contrasts starkly with thepresent in which most Palestinians in Israel lead their lives, a present characterisedby loss of honour and land, by cultural marginalisation in a society whosedominant culture is not Arab, by political and economic disempowerment.Their lives unfold in a distinctly un-heroic context, their present characterisedby Vance’s deficiency and lack. There is a disjuncture, then, between the presentof the performance, what I will call the signifying context, and the signifiedcontext created mimetically within the performance.Not only do participants in the wedding sahrah face the wide gap thatseparates the two contexts of the performance, but through the speech acts ofthe poets they are prevented from forgetting for any length of time the existenceof both contexts. Herein lies the transforming nature of the poetry. It is notmerely the evocation of an ideal Arab, mythic past, but its intimate linkage ona number of linguistic levels with the un-heroic present which effects thetransformation. To begin with, the Palestinian wedding eve performance ischaracterised by an inordinate amount of commentary that is in some waymetacommunicative. 12 In any given performance, approximately 25 per cent ofall lines will be ‘meta-poetic’. That is, they are explicitly about the poets aspoets, their poetry or the performance. Poets boast of their fame and compositionalskill, of the beauty and force of their verses, of the distance they havetravelled to attend the celebration, and of the excellence of the sahrah itself.Another 30 per cent are meta-performative, meaning they include specificmention of the guests at the sahrah and their home villages, calls to the saff, andpraise for the excellence of the sahrah itself. A significant percentage of theselines are greetings and as such are, at least in their use in their quotidiancontext, phatic. Thus, more than half of the lines of a typical performance referto the signifying context.Other oral poetic traditions in the Arab world also contain a high frequencyof metacommunicative or phatic utterances. Both Reynolds, writing about theoral epic in Egypt, and Caton, describing oral poetry in Yemen, also note thephenomenon in the oral poetry they study. Reynolds describes the way in whichthe mood of the evening affects the performance’s text:Part of the dynamic of the sahrah context is the weaving of elements from theperformance situation first into the performance text and then back into the sahrahsetting. Over and over again an evening gathering develops around an idea or a moodthat is reiterated in different forms. To some extent this quality is found in anyhuman dialogue or conversation, but the sahrah context seems to invite suchparticipation in a more formalized, more performance-oriented manner. (1993: 185)Caton expresses the same idea in terms of the speech acts inherent to thepoetry’s verbal formulas:— 25 —www.taq.ir